“Saved by the historic page”: Charlotte Smith’s Arun River Sonnets

Abstract

THE IMPORTANCE OF HISTORY IN CHARLOTTE SMITH'S POETRY HAS ATTRACTED much attention in recent years. With discussions usually focusing on the two mature works, The Emigrants (1793) and Beachy Head (1807), a portrait has emerged of Smith as a kind of author-historian with diverse interests in natural and political histories. Scholars of her work have yet to note the topic's significance in her earliest poetry, and no sustained analysis of its initial appearance as a subject of serious interest for Smith has been offered hitherto. Although over the course of her career she would gradually depart from the restrictive sonnet form for the freedom of blank verse in order to explore ideas of greater complexity and depth, her earliest sonnets contain the genesis of her unique melding of local history and emotional inflection that she helped popularize in loco-descriptive verse. Of primary interest are her sonnets to the Arun River. First published in the third edition of Elegiac Sonnets in 1786, they memorialize locally-born poets William Collins, William Hayley, and Thomas Otway, and demonstrate that Smith was interested both in the history of her Surrey homeland and in the poet's role as chronicler of local legends. In the absence of any existing study into how Smith presents the issue of history in these poems, a brief overview of them is organized thematically at the outset of this essay and is followed by a discussion of their engagement with various poetic traditions. In the Arun River sonnets, Smith celebrates the literary history of her surroundings at Woolbeding House, an ancient stone-built home in Sussex, near Midhurst, where she resided with her family for roughly two years. (1) She and her children moved to Woolbeding in the spring of 1785, after having spent several difficult months in Normandy in an effort to flee her insolvent husband Benjamin's creditors. (2) The series consists of four poems. Sonnets xxvi and xxxn describe the poet's perception of the ghostlike presence of Thomas Otway, who was born in nearby Milland in 1652, with his father serving as rector of Woolbeding's All Hallows Church. Sonnets XXX and XXXIII pay tribute to Sussex-born poets William Collins and William Hayley, as well as Otway, and praise the region as enchanted for poetic creation. (3) Smith describes Otway, Collins, and Hayley as poets of her own sensibility, whose presence can be felt by their present-day through the land. (4) In the four sonnets, the process by which these kindred spirits preserve the life stories of their famed ancestors, particularly Otway's, is one of Smith's primary themes. In particular, the Arun sonnets focus on the endurance and fortitude of the poets' life stories. The topic of how the past is preserved--both verbally and on the historic page--also recurs in these and in the later Sonnet XLVI, Written at Penshurst in Autumn 1788. The latter work is her early poetry's most extensive and overt exploration of the artist's role as historian, but its relevance to the sequence is lost on us unless we grasp the significance of the Arun sonnets written two years earlier. In Sonnet XXVI, To the River Arun, she describes a process of verbal storytelling, in which the tale of Otway is handed down through time and becomes a kind of local lore. On thy wild banks, by frequent torrents worn, No glittering fanes, or marble domes appear, Yet shall the mournful Muse thy course adorn, And still to her thy rustic waves be dear. For with the infant Otway, lingering here, Of early woes she bade her votary dream, While thy low murmurs sooth'd his pensive ear, And still the poet--consecrates the stream. Beneath the oak and birch that fringe thy side, The first-born violets of the year shall spring; And in thy hazles, bending o'er the tide, The earliest nightingale delight to sing: While kindred spirits, pitying, shall relate Thy Otway's sorrows, and lament his fate! …